Alicia Bognanno’s voice is a powerful instrument, raw as sushi and stuffed with endless ennui. Her band, Bully, is a traditional 4-piece outfit—two guitars, a bass, drums—that backs Bognanno with crunchy, forceful grooves. They are currently on tour behind their second full-length, Losing, and will play Gasa Gasa Sunday night, with support from Cincinnati shoegazers Smut.

The context for Downtown Boys reasserts itself weekly if not daily. The band formed in 2014, two years before Donald Trump was elected president, but the Trump Administration gives the political punk band a reason to exist almost every time he or his Cabinet members open their mouths. Team Trump didn’t invent racism, sexism, transphobia, colonialism and toxic masculinity, but it uses these tools to assert the preeminent position of wealthy straight white men in the culture daily.

Despite its mysterious name, Mipso is a remarkably plainspoken outfit. On its third album, Coming Down the Mountain, released in April, the band deals with heartbreak, homesickness, and wanderlust. The songs treat these well-trodden subjects with care, but they don’t mince words. They are clean and straightforward, rooted firmly in the folk tradition, but never overly folksy.

Last Thursday night, Toronto’s Austra played Gasa Gasa in support of the band’s new album, Future Politics. Our new photographer Steph Catsoulis was there, and she says the album’s electronic chill doesn’t do justice to the band’s live sound.

“I’m not trying to soundtrack your fucking life,” says Alex Brettin, a.k.a. Mild High Club. “This is just my thing, and if you like it, hell yeah, I hope it’s inspiring, but if you don’t, fuck off.” This statement sums up Brettin’s marketing strategy pretty neatly. He takes his music seriously, and doesn’t have time for anyone who isn’t going to listen to it that way.

I went to see Marissa Nadler at Gasa Gasa Wednesday night feeling a little out of myself, biking there in an unexplained cloud of dissociation and melancholy. Fortunately, she made me feel the beauty in that ambient isolation.

“I was so stressed,” recalls The Dodos' vocalist and guitarist Meric Long. On a lark, he DJ’d at a museum event in the band’s native San Francisco, “and did the worst thing you can do as a DJ, which is have the music cut out.” But watching the guests meander, Long saw attendees were more focused on the planetarium’s spinning space bodies than his own rotating records, “which made it okay because then I was like, ‘Okay, they’re obviously not paying attention.’”

Sylvan Esso is a band well-versed in opposites. Amelia Meath, former member of the a cappella folk trio Mountain Man, and electronic producer Nick Sanborn met after his solo project Made of Oak was asked to open for her band.